Multifamily Starts Filling Hole Left by Great Recession

Apartment construction has run at multidecade highs in recent years, but the market is still about 40,000 units shy of where it would be had developers maintained the moderate pace of construction seen in the 13 years before the Great Recession. According to seasonally unadjusted data from the U.S. Census Bureau, multifamily starts averaged close to 300,000 units annually from 1995 through 2008, prior to the Great Recession’s crushing effect on housing starts. During the recession, multifamily starts plunged, averaging about 174,000 units in 2009 to 2013. Had the Great Recession not occurred and starts had remained at a pace of around 300,000 units annually, developers would have built more than half a million additional multifamily units than they actually did. Since 2013, the U.S. has seen elevated construction activity, averaging over 364,000 multifamily units started annually.